Food Auntie

My mother loves to cook, and as a result, I love to eat. My favorite memories of spending time with Mama involve watching her prepare a meal. Sometimes she would let me cut onions and chilis, always warning me not to touch my eye. Bent over the adalo, she would put her whole back into scraping coconut for fish curry.

Mealtime was always a feast at our house. I never knew that other people didn't eat this way until I went to college and watched how others would salivate when I brought back to the dorm bags of cooked food Mama had frozen and kept waiting for me when I visited home.

This food haul would continue through the years. At some point, Mama just started asking me what I wanted to eat, since it was a given she would be cooking for me. I always asked for Pork Indad.

Pork Indad is a Mangalorean and Goan dish. It is a sweet, hot pork curry that tastes so good it will make you want to cry. Mangaloreans eat it at Christmas and other holiday times. At our house, we ate it all the time. The picture above features Indad (the dish at the bottom), as cooked by Mama for Thankgiving 2009.  Below is Mama's recipe, cut and pasted from an email.

Pork Indad
1 pound pork
5 red chillies and 2 green chillies
1/2" ginger
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
2 medium or 1/1/2 big onions cut into pieces
10 peppercorns
2 cloves and 1/2 inch cinnamon
1 tablespoon full raisins or couple of dates
little tamarind
2 cloves garlic
1/2 teaspoon poppy seeds (kuskus)
few mint leaves
1/4 teaspoon turmeric
vinegar

Grind all the dry ingredients in the coffee grinder. Put the onions in the blender first then put the wet ingredients like, garlic, ginger, green chillies, tamarind, raisins and mint leaves then put the dry ground ingredients. Grind it with vinegar adding little by little, about 3 tablespoons, if needed more liquid add little water (little at a time).

Cut the meat and put a little salt and keep it aside for about half an hour. Fry it in very little oil. In a pot put oil and cut 1/4 of an onion sliced, when it is brown add the masala and fry it on slow fire for a while stirring every now and then. Add about half a teaspoonful sugar. Once it is fried add the masala from the blender and add water to the consistency you want, bring it to a boil and then add the meat and salt, not too much since the meat already has some. Cook until the meat is tender. If you want to add the potatoes you can.

Good luck.

What make coffee grinder did you get? (hopefully Braun)